We are in Florida also and we hear the same excuse from the gifted "experts" about schooling:
The gifted coordinator's response was DS has to learn he cannot always go at his own pace. My response was he goes to school to learn not to learn that he is not allowed to learned. She said they will run out of math curriculum to teach him in elementary school if the move him too quickly.
( Adding on to that, our gifted peeps said DS doesn't even need to be in school for academics, he needs to be in school for social skills. )
Add us to the list that has heard this from schools in Fl too. Ours was with respect to language arts rather than math, but they managed to use exactly the same words!
We were also told DD8 (just finished gr 3) shouldn't be grade skipped to gr 5 because even that would probably not be enough and then what would we do - "this could put her on track to graduate at 10, then what would you do?" Then we were told that the other problem was that there is no teacher at the gifted magnet program she was in that could keep up with her even if they wanted to!
(Gives you a lot of hope in the program doesn't it?)
We have decided to start homeschooling our DD this fall because of the complete lack of flexibility of the schools in our area. We have 1 last hope, that would be partial schooling with radical acceleration to gr 6 rather than full-time school, and we'd home school the rest. (We'll fill you all in on the details when we find out if it will happen or not - I don't want to jinx it
).
